When talking about Cat’s Cradle and The Things They Carried, it’s easy to get caught up in a discussion of what’s real and what’s not. I don’t think it really matters. Vonnegut and O’Brien are using stories, true, false, doesn’t matter, to simply help the reader understand their world and thoughts. O’Brien doesn’t outright say what Vietnam was, and he couldn’t if he tried. But he can tell stories to show what it was, and use that to understand life. It’s just a matter of framing. Vonnegut doesn’t say – hey science is this way – but he weaves stories to put into a fresh perspective, to help us incorporate how he feels about it into our pattern of thinking.
You could try to make Cat’s Cradle into a point for point analogy Europe WWII or something like that; you could try to ground all of the outrageous ideas Vonnegut has to real world examples; but in the process you would lose sight of the fact that Vonnegut didn’t sit down and write a book called Why Life is Meaningless. He wrote one called Cat’s Cradle and it’s made of many complex, intertwining threads, just like the cradle. Story telling is not about simple truths, or simple lies.If you get up from either one of these books thinking – Wow, Vietnam was hell, or wow, religion is stupid – you’ve missed the point. “In the end there’s nothing to say about a true war story, except maybe, ‘Oh’”(O'Brien 74).
On an unrelated note, I found the real life equivalent of ice-nine: prions, the misfolded proteins that cause mad cow disease, chronic wasting disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. These are proteins that have been twisted (sometimes by a genetic mutation) into a self replicating form. Just like ice-nine, whenever they touch another similar protein, they provide a template for the new protein to conform to, and they keep replicating in this pattern exponentially. Like ice-nine, they are massively destructive. Once a person shows symptoms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, they usually die within six months. This is the human version of the Cat's Cradle apocalypse, caused by the stacking crystals of ice-nine. Like an ice-nine apocalypse, a prion infection is irreversible.
More similarities: Ice-nine is more solid and stable than normal ice or water,and in prions, the misfolded version of the protein is also more stable than the normal protein and can resist heat that would denature the original protein. This means that cooked meat can still contain prions.
One minor difference: Prions are real.
Scary shit, huh?
On a note related to your first paragraph, I went through the various accolades from literary critics printed in the front of the book, and I found that a surprising number of them echoed the same 'war is hell' mentality that O'Brien claims he does not want people to focus on. Not many of them mentioned anything about O'Brien's discussion of the craft of writing as it relates to storytelling and to his attempt to preserve his own life as 'Timmy.' In fact, I believe the only review that did mention the craft of writing was the one from the New York Times that is on the front cover of some of the books. It seems strange to me that, despite what O'Brien says about war stories not being moral or having some big, grandiose statement to make about war or human nature, people still interpret war stories that way. I wonder if it is because the sheer magnitude of war, the thought that hundreds of thousands of human beings are killing each other on principle alone, makes us want there to be some point to it all, some big lesson that will help contextualize the senselessness of it all. After all, we can read as much or as little into O'Brien's words as we choose. It seems to me that many people have chosen to read only as far into the narrative as they are comfortable with so they can be placated by some trite 'war is hell' moral that, while true to a certain extent, is never any deeper than a quote on the back cover of a book with much more to offer.
ReplyDeleteAlso, a very interesting observation about prions!